Washington Post -As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.
Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.
Trump’s remarkably blunt and transactional pitch reveals how the former president is targeting the oil industry to finance his reelection bid. At the same time, he has turned to the industry to help shape his environmental agenda for a second term, including the rollbacks of some of Biden’s signature achievements on clean energy and electric vehicles.
The climate crisis turned the drought that struck the Amazon rainforest in 2023 into a devastating event, a study has found.
The drought was the worst recorded in many places and hit the maximum “exceptional” level on the scientific scale. Without planet-warming emissions from the burning of oil, gas and coal, the drought would have been far less extreme, the analysis found.
It also showed the drought was made 30 times more likely to happen by global heating. The return of the natural El Niño climate phenomenon is associated with drier conditions but played only a small role, the scientists said.
The climate crisis is supercharging extreme weather across the planet, but the extreme Amazon drought is a stark and worrying example because the rainforest is already thought to be close to a tipping point into a drier state. This would result in a mass die-off of trees in the world’s most important store of carbon on land, releasing large amounts of CO2 and driving global temperatures even higher.
Millions of people in the Amazon have been affected by the drought, with some rivers at their lowest levels for more than a century. There have been drinking water shortages, failed crops and power cuts, as hydroelectric plants dried up. The drought also worsened wildfires and high water temperatures were linked to a mass mortality of river life, including the deaths of more than 150 endangered pink river dolphins in a single week.
Like the comet striking the dinosaurs – in slower motion, but just as deadly – human activity is hacking off entire branches from the tree of life, a new study confirms.
"It is changing the trajectory of evolution globally and destroying the conditions that make human life possible," ecologists warn in their new paper.
"It is an irreversible threat to the persistence of civilization and the livability of future environments for Homo sapiens."
Over a hundred dolphins were found dead in the Brazilian Amazon over the last seven days, amid record-breaking water temperatures of more than 102 degrees. Researchers are working to rescue surviving dolphins and transfer them to other bodies of water, but the task has proved difficult.
Nicola Jones7 Jul 2023Yale Environment 360 ----- As the atmosphere warms, oceans around the world are becoming ever more deprived of oxygen, forcing many species to migrate from their usual homes. Researchers expect many places to experience a decline in species diversity, ending up with just those few species that can cope with the harsher conditions. ----- Our future ocean — warmer and oxygen-deprived — will not only hold fewer kinds of fish, but also smaller, stunted fish and, to add insult to injury, more greenhouse-gas producing bacteria, scientists say. The tropics will empty as fish move to more oxygenated waters, says Pauly, and those specialist fish already living at the poles will face extinction. -----
when researchers take the time to compare the three effects — warming, acidification and deoxygenation — the impacts of low oxygen are the worst.
“That’s not so surprising,” says Wilco Verberk, an eco-physiologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands. “If you run out of oxygen, the other problems are inconsequential.” Fish, like other animals, need to breathe.
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Oxygen levels in the world’s oceans have already dropped more than 2 per cent between 1960 and 2010, and they are expected to decline up to seven per cent below the 1960 level over the next century. Some patches are worse than others — the top of the northeast Pacific has lost more than 15 per cent of its oxygen.
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The Global Ocean Oxygen Network — a scientific group set up as part of the United Nations’ Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, 2021-30 — reports that since the 1960s, the area of low-oxygen water in the open ocean has increased by 4.4 million square kilometres. That’s an area a little more than half the size of Canada. By 2080, a 2021 study reported, more than 70 per cent of the global oceans will experience noticeable deoxygenation.
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One issue, he notes, is that low-oxygen conditions tend to host a class of anoxic bacteria that produce methane or nitrous oxide — potent greenhouse gases.
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In general, a hot fish has a higher metabolism and needs more oxygen. Trout, for example, need five to six times more dissolved oxygen when waters are a balmy 24 C than when they are a chilly 5 C. So as waters warm and the oxygen seeps out, many marine creatures take a double hit. “Fish require a lot of oxygen, particularly the large
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A 2021 paper showed that the oceans are already committed to a fourfold greater oxygen loss, even if CO2 emissions stop immediately.
That is indeed a scary possibility. But there is a scarier possibility, in many ways more plausible: We never really wake up at all.
No moment of reckoning arrives. The atmosphere becomes progressively more unstable, but it never does so fast enough, dramatically enough, to command the sustained attention of any particular generation of human beings. Instead, it is treated as rising background noise.
Maybe climate chaos, a rising chorus of alarm signals from around the world, will simply become our new normal. Hell, maybe income inequality, political dysfunction, and successive waves of a deadly virus will become our new normal. Maybe we’ll just get used to [waves hands] all this.
Humans often don’t remember what we’ve lost or demand that it be restored. Rather, we adjust to what we’ve got.
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"An animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct, it becomes rare,” says Pauly in his TED talk on shifting baselines. “So you don’t lose abundant animals. You always lose rare animals. And therefore, they’re not perceived as a big loss.”
The same phenomenon is sometimes called “generational amnesia,” the tendency of each generation to disregard what has come before and benchmark its own experience of nature as normal
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It’s not just intergenerationally that we forget, either. The Imperial College researchers also demonstrated the existence of another form of shifting baselines syndrome: personal amnesia, “where knowledge extinction occurs as individuals forget their own experience.”
Just as generations forget about ecological loss, so do individuals
It turns out that, over the course of their lives, individuals do just what generations do — periodically reset and readjust to new baselines.
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Just as we adjust emotionally, we adjust cognitively. We forget what came before; we simply don’t think about it. For the most part, only our recent experience is salient in defining our baselines, our sense of normal.
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“The reference point for normal conditions appears to be based on weather experienced between 2 and 8 years ago,” the study concluded.
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Once you start thinking in terms of shifting baselines, you start seeing them everywhere, not just in ecology.
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It’s not just about documenting decline, either. There have been long-term victories, too — reductions in poverty, increases in the number of educated young girls, declines in air pollution, and so forth. These also happen incrementally, often beneath our notice. We adjust our baselines upward and do not register what, over time, can be substantial victories. Making those victories more visible can help show that decline is not inevitable.
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Negative changes “are normalized more quickly if you feel like there’s nothing you can do about it,” says Moore.
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Our extraordinary ability to adapt, to get on with it, to not dwell in the past, was enormously useful in our evolutionary history. But it is making it difficult for us to keep our attention focused on how much is being lost — and thus difficult for us to rally around efforts to stem those losses.
And so, little by little, a hotter, more chaotic, and more dangerous world is becoming normal to us, as we sleepwalk toward more tragedies.
Decades of suppressing natural fires have allowed fuel for wildfires to accumulate to dangerously high levels. Humans are also heating up the planet, lifting sea levels, amplifying downpours, and exacerbating the conditions for massive blazes.
So when disasters do occur, they cause extraordinary damage to lives, livelihoods, and property. These threats have led insurance companies to drop existing policies or stop issuing new coverage. "It’s not just the risk of loss but the magnitude of loss when a California house burns down,” saidDave Jones, who served as California’s insurance commissioner from 2011 until 2018. “That trend has only gotten worse over time.”
If insurers priced their policies in line with growing risks, they’ll soon be too expensive for all but the wealthiest people, leaving the most vulnerable with no protection. If rates are capped too low, insurers may not have enough money to cover all their claims or stay in business. In California, some insurance companies ended up leaving the market or dropping their customers altogether.
Brazil has banned live cattle exports from its ports, in a move that animal rights campaigners have described as “historic.”
The South American country brought in the new law last month. Speaking about the ruling, federal judge Djalma Gomes said: “Animals are not things. They are sentient living beings, that is, individuals who feel hunger, thirst, pain, cold, anguish, fear.”
The new law is a result of a 2017 lawsuit from the National Forum for the Protection and Defense of Animals, a Brazilian NGO. Heralding the “historic” move, the group praised its recognition of “the suffering caused to animals … in an activity similar to human trafficking at the time of slavery.”
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Exporting live animals from country to country is a hugely controversial practice. Each year, millions of animals endure journeys of hundreds – and sometimes thousands – of miles. They typically travel by truck, train, plane, or ship.
Such journeys inevitably come with huge welfare costs for animals, who suffer from dehydration, stress, hunger, and overcrowding. Many will die before they reach their destination. Cattle aren’t the only animals to fall victim – horses, pigs, goats, and sheep are also regularly exported.
As well as the suffering endured on regular crossings, some animals have also perished in accidents at sea during transport. In 2019, a ship named the Queen Hind carrying 14,000 sheep from Romania to Saudi Arabia capsized. Almost every single animal drowned .
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Brazil is just the latest in a long line of countries to have made moves away from live exports in recent years. In April 2023, New Zealand’s (Aotearoa’s) ban on the practice was enacted. The country, which previously exported live animals for breeding, not slaughter, made the decision two years after 41 crew members and 6,000 cattle died after a ship sank during a storm.
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There are also increasing calls across Europe to ban live exports. Luxemburg last year cracked down on the industry, and Germany recently announced that it would stop exporting to countries outside of the EU. Romania – a top sheep exporter – has reportedly been considering a ban since the sinking of the Queen Hind.
Honeybees kept under laboratory conditions in the US only live half as long as they did in the 1970s, suggesting that genetics could be contributing to colony losses, and not just environmental factors such as pesticides and sources of food.
Five decades ago, the median lifespan for a worker western honeybee (Apis mellifera) that spent its adult life in a controlled environment was 34.3 days. Now, the median is 17.7 days, according to research by Anthony Nearman and Dennis vanEngelsdorp at the University of Maryland.
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The change implies that solutions to the reduced life of colonies in the field, a problem increasingly encountered by beekeepers, may be found in the bees themselves.
“For the most part, honeybees are livestock, so beekeepers and breeders often selectively breed from colonies with desirable traits like disease resistance,” says Nearman.
“In this case, it may be possible that selecting for the outcome of disease resistance was an inadvertent selection for reduced lifespan among individual bees,” he says. “Shorter-lived bees would reduce the probability of spreading disease, so colonies with shorter lived bees would appear healthier.”
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Experimental honeybees are collected from hives as pupae within 24 hours of emerging from their wax cells, meaning that early exposure to pathogens or pesticides as larvae can’t be ruled out as a factor. However, the bees used in the current study showed no overt symptoms of such exposure, says Nearman.
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Further research will look at lifespan trends across different parts of the US and around the world, in an attempt to compare the relative impact of genetic and environmental factors.
Patrick Greenfield @pgreenfielduk Wed 12 Oct 2022 19.01 EDT
Earth’s wildlife populations have plunged by an average of 69% in just under 50 years, according to a leading scientific assessment, as humans continue to clear forests, consume beyond the limits of the planet and pollute on an industrial scale.
From the open ocean to tropical rainforests, the abundance of birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles is in freefall, declining on average by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 2018, according to the WWF and Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) biennial Living Planet Report. Two years ago, the figure stood at 68%, four years ago, it was at 60%.
Many scientists believe we are living through the sixth mass extinction – the largest loss of life on Earth since the time of the dinosaurs – and that it is being driven by humans. The report’s 89 authors are urging world leaders to reach an ambitious agreement at the Cop15 biodiversity summit in Canada this December and to slash carbon emissions to limit global heating to below 1.5C this decade to halt the rampant destruction of nature.
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“Despite the science, the catastrophic projections, the impassioned speeches and promises, the burning forests, submerged countries, record temperatures and displaced millions, world leaders continue to sit back and watch our world burn in front of our eyes,” said Steele. “The climate and nature crises, their fates entwined, are not some faraway threat our grandchildren will solve with still-to-be-discovered technology.”
News Release 30-Sep-2022 Peer-Reviewed Publication Washington University in St. Louis
A long-term study led by primatologist Crickette Sanz at Washington University in St. Louis reveals the first evidence of lasting social relationships between chimpanzees and gorillas in the wild.
News Release 20-Sep-2022 Study highlights the importance of biodiversity to human health Peer-Reviewed Publication
University of California - Davis
Dozens of species of frogs, salamanders and other amphibians quietly disappeared from parts of Latin America in the 1980s and 2000s, with little notice from humans, outside of a small group of ecologists. Yet the amphibian decline had direct health consequences for people, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.
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Shortly after the mass die-off of amphibians in Costa Rica and Panama, both countries experienced a spike in malaria cases.
Some frogs, salamanders and other amphibians eat hundreds of mosquito eggs each day. Mosquitoes are a vector for malaria. Scientists wondered, could the crash in amphibians have influenced the rise in malaria cases?
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The results show a clear connection between the time and location of the spread of the fungal pathogen and the time and location of increases in malaria cases. The scientists note that while they cannot fully rule out another confounding factor, they found no evidence of other variables that could both drive malaria and follow the same pattern of die-offs.
Tree cover loss was also associated with an increase in malaria cases, but not nearly to the same extent as the loss of amphibians. Typical levels of tree canopy loss increase annual malaria cases by up to 0.12 cases per 1,000 people, compared to 1 in 1,000 for the amphibian die-off.
News Release 20-Jul-2022 Peer-Reviewed Publication University of Bristol
New research has revealed an association between the feeding of raw meat to pet dogs and the presence of bacteria resistant to critically important antibiotics.
Two studies led by a team at the University of Bristol have found dogs who are fed on a diet of raw meat were more likely to excrete antibiotic-resistant bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli) in their faeces. Previous research has shown that there is the potential for bacteria to be shared between dogs and their human owners through everyday interaction, leading the researchers to suggest that raw feeding is not the safest dietary choice, and that, if chosen, owners should take extra precautions when handling raw meat and be especially careful to clean up after their dog.
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The environment a dog lives in also played a part in the potential for them excreting resistant bacteria. Raw feeding was a strong risk factor for dogs living in the countryside, while in city-dwelling dogs, risk factors were much more complicated, probably reflecting the variety of lifestyles and exposures among city dogs.
The River Rhine, one of Europe's most important rivers which is used to transport cargo including chemicals, grains, and coal across the continent, is drying up amid record-breaking summer heatwaves.
Germany's Federal Institute of Hydrology has warned that rivers in Central Europe are at "unusually low" levels and are continuing to fall.
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Southwest Germany news outlet SWR reported that the low level of water is limiting shipping on the Rhine south of Duisburg and Cologne and that for days, freight ships haven't been able to travel fully-loaded.
A representative for Germany's Federal Institute of Hydrology told Bloomberg that if the level at Kaub dips down to 40 centimeters (15.7 inches), it's uneconomical for vessels carrying commodities to sail past it given how little cargo they'd be able to carry.
The low water levels already impacting energy supplies. The supply of coal to two power stations in Germany – one in Mannheim and another in Karlsruhe – has been "affected" by low water levels in the Rhine since July 13, according to the EEX exchange.
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Low water levels on the Rhine having an economic impact has not been uncommon in recent years, with a lack of water in the river attributed in 2019 to causing a short-lived recession in Germany at the tail end of 2018.
Pantheon Macroeconomics said in January 2019 that low river levels effectively amount to a "supply shock in German manufacturing," by lowering the availability of key goods needed for the sector.
News Release 28-Jun-2022 New guidelines needed on pile driving noise for offshore wind turbine installation Peer-Reviewed Publication American Institute of Physics
Noise produced by pile drivers building offshore wind turbines can damage the hearing of porpoises, seals, and other marine life. Regulations are in place, but guidance on this difficult topic requires regular revisits to incorporate results from new experiments.
If greenhouse gas pollution remains unchecked, global warming could trigger the most catastrophic extinction of ocean species since the end of the Permian age, about 250 million years ago, scientists warned in a new study today. During the end-Permian Extinction, researchers estimate up to 90 percent of marine organisms died out in overheated, acidic and deoxygenated oceans.
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That cataclysmic change may have resulted from giant volcanic eruptions that went on for 2 million years. But a 2021 study suggested that carbon dioxide emissions from current human activity are twice as high as those that caused the Permian climate to shift.
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Global greenhouse gas concentrations are reaching new record levels each year, and Deutsch said that, given the political and economic uncertainties highlighted by events like the invasion of Ukraine, the possibility that diplomatic efforts to curb warming could fizzle can’t be ruled out.
Malin Pinsky, a Rutgers ecologist and evolutionary biologist who wrote a Perspective article about the new research by Deutsch and Penn, said global policy choices the last few decades have already prompted massive and rapid ocean changes, such as sea level rise, ocean acidification and global shifts of species, which are affecting food security in developing countries. More than half of all human-caused CO2 produced since 1750 have been emitted in just the last 30 years.
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Oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped on the Earth’s surface by greenhouse gas pollution, building up at a rate equivalent to five atom bomb explosions per second. The average ocean temperature has reached record highs almost yearly, and its surface waters have grown 30 percent more acidic in the past 200 years.
Hot water is already killing marine life, and has perhaps already resulted in extinctions of regionally endemic species, especially during extreme events like marine heat waves.
News Release 13-Apr-2022 Survey findings may support nutritionally complete vegan dog diets over raw or conventional meat diets Peer-Reviewed Publication PLOS
A survey study of the guardians of more than 2,500 dogs explored links between dog diet and health outcomes, suggesting that nutritionally sound vegan diets may be healthier and less hazardous than conventional or raw meat-based diets. Andrew Knight of the University of Winchester, U.K., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on April 13, 2022.
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Further research is needed to confirm whether a raw meat or a vegan diet is associated with better dog health outcomes. The researchers suggest that large-scale, cross-sectional, and longitudinal studies of dogs, maintained on different diets, which utilizes data such as results of veterinary clinical examinations and veterinary medical histories, could yield results of greater reliability. Still, prior research has linked raw meat diets to increased risk of pathogens and nutritional deficiencies. In light of both the new and prior findings, the researchers suggest that a nutritionally sound vegan diet may in fact be the healthiest and least hazardous choice for dogs.
News Release 23-Feb-2022 Bringing out the best in wild birds on farms Peer-Reviewed Publication University of California - Davis
A supportive environment can bring out the best in an individual — even for a bird.
After an E.coli outbreak in 2006 devastated the spinach industry, farmers were pressured to remove natural habitat to keep wildlife — and the foodborne pathogens they can sometimes carry — from visiting crops. A study published today from the University of California, Davis, shows that farms with surrounding natural habitat experience the most benefits from birds, including less crop damage and lower food-safety risks.
The study, published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, was conducted at 21 strawberry fields along California’s Central Coast. It found that birds were more likely to carry pathogens and eat berries without surrounding natural habitat.
A drought has gripped Chile for 13 years and the flowers that fed Carlos Peralta’s honeybees around the central town of Colina have grown increasingly scarce.
He said he had lost about 300 hives since the start of November and was left with a choice: try to keep the 900 that remained alive with an artificial nectar or move them to a place where flowers and pollen are more abundant.
“If the bees die, we all die. ... The bee is life,” he said, referring to the insects’ key role in pollinating plants both wild and commercial, helping Chile maintain its role as a major fruit exporter.
So Peralta decided to move his operations some 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) to the south, to Puerto Montt.
Andrés González, a regional expert on biodiversity for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, said a reduced population of pollinating insects “has to do ... with the use of pesticides and fertilizers, monocultures, droughts caused in great part by climate change and by bad management of (water) resources.”
